Smartphones drive language learning innovation
August 2009 – AFP
Guy Newey at AFP looks at the ways in which smartphones, such as the iPhone and Google Android, are driving innovation in the language-learning industry.
Ken Carroll, co-founder of Praxis Language, comments on the development of the emergent mobile learning sector – and his faith in this technology.
The article can be read in [...]
Day in the Life: The Podcast Manager
December 2008 – City Weekend
Shanghai’s CityWeekend magazine took a behind-the-scenes peek at the work (and play) of John Pasden, Praxis Language Senior Product Manager and ChinesePod host, tracking his typical day in their weekly column, Day in the Life.
Read John’s entertaining diary-style entry in full:
Link
Insanity and Learning in the USA
The holidays are almost upon us, but at 88Groups we’re trying to dish out some learning gifts a bit earlier. Here are some highlights from the last week:
Brendan reveals a great character — 嚏 — for making your Chinese friends lose a little bit of face on Character Insanity.
Bill offers an alternative to Character Insanity [...]
Group Building and Ox Saliva
Now that 88Groups has been open for a few weeks, we’re starting to see some lively groups form and discussion begin. We’re also seeing a variety of groups form, and we think that from this variety there will be some really interesting content in the coming weeks and months. Some groups to watch (and [...]
Unveiling 88Groups
Today I’d like to talk a little about the newest addition to the Praxis Language family — 88Groups. First, though, I’m going to take a short diversion into the world of music remixing (I promise it’s not totally unrelated!).
One of my favorite albums is DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, an underground remix of Jay-Z’s [...]
SpanishSense Changes
As regular listeners will already know, SpanishSense has recently gone to a 3-a-week lesson publication schedule. It’s time to reveal why…
SpanishSense has been running for 6 months now, and it’s been a real learning experience for us to grapple with a new language. We’ve worked hard, creating new tools to teach verb conjugations, and new [...]
Is knowledge delivered or constructed?
One of the questions discussed at Learning 2.0 was this: Is knowledge delivered or constructed? Let’s take a look at it.
Delivering knowledge
Traditionally, the task of the educator was to deliver knowledge: teachers took pre-packaged data and dispensed it to learners. Teachers were active, if not dominant (dispeners) while students were passive (receptacles).
Obviously, data can be delivered. Books have done an incredibly good [...]
‘Unconferences’actually work.
The recent learning 2.0 conference included a number of ‘unconference’ sessions – free-form discussion groups that set their own agendas, rather than pre-ordained powerpoint presentations. I had been a bit skeptical about how these might work in practice. I thought they might lack focus. In fact, the sessions worked really well. Instead of just listening, [...]
Technical difficulties
Hi guys,
We are experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment. Please do bear with us whilst we try and bring both sites back up again.
Kind regards,
Eileen
Update: We are now back online!
Celebrating SpanishSense’s 100th lesson!
5 months have passed since we first launched SpanishSense to the general public and we are now proud to announce that we have released our 100th lesson today entitled “Visita a la Fábrica (advanced)“!
That’s right, we now have 34 newbie, 34 elementary, 13 intermediate, 11 upper intermediate, and 8 advanced lessons in the lesson archive. [...]